food for inquisition/thought. die pairings, survival rates, reported mintages, rarity etc

LanceNewmanOCC

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i was just thinking about how inaccurate the mint records have been deemed throughout our minting history including how many dies were made/used making early numismatists have to work hard in their day before all this useful technology.

then all the people having to coordinate their efforts to even being to imagine how many have survived for common marriages, let alone the various rarity estimates for those from r4-r8+.

so now we take many decades of events and wonder how many are still out there undocumented or purposefully not reported.

there are possibly records/notations from the mint as to how many coins were struck before dies were exchanged/re-used giving some estimations if the dies were labeled.

but i'm not to the main point yet.

do the rarity numbers apply to marriages of estimated minted coins or the ones purported to still have survived?

why would this even matter you ask? well lets evaluate it real quick.

IF some sort of estimations could be made as for how many coins were struck using certain dies and then tracking any melting of said coinage due to over-estimations of how many coins were needed etc then we could attempt to estimate what the rarity would be as the coins were when they left the mint for circulation.

well if that is not even plausible, which it may very well not be. then we are simply left to find out all on our own how many are estimated to have survived until today.

if it is plausible to even get close estimates from records how many were minted then it may be found that many marriages are much more common than are reported, or better yet, much more scarce especially once we factor in many of the variables for the coins journey from the mint until today.

tracking certain dies used multiple times and for more than one year it is easy to presume that any marriages with those dies would be scarce determinable by the amount of coins one die could average and do some calculating of how many coins one die would have been estimated to have struck and thusly how many more one could calculate or presume would be struck.

i'd go into it a little more extensively but i'm dog tired from a nasty little bug having a field day using me as its party house ><
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DaveG

While I'm not sure what you're trying to say, records of how many dies were made/used do exist - depending on what time period you're talking about.

For example, RW Julian, in articles about the Charlotte and New Orleans mints, lists how many obverses and reverses for the various denominations were shipped (and on what dates) from the Philadelphia mint.

QDB, in his silver dollar encyclopedia, list how many obverses and reverses were made for each date.

Also, in the Mint Annual Reports, from about the 1870s to the early 20th century, list how many dies and for which denominations were manufactured for each mint. While the Mint Annual Reports don't distinguish between obverses and reverses, you can at least learn if a mint had dies and didn't use them or didn't produce a certain denomination in a specific year because it had no dies for that denomination.

There may be additional information on dies in the National Archives.

Also, there is reported to be additional information in the hands of the mint, which has never been shared with numismatic researchers.

DIMEMAN

I know that this is about Bust coinage die marriages but on a related note.......

I have always felt that most if not all varieties started out with a full number of however many were struck with a single die. Like DDO's DDR's RPM's RPD's and such.

Unless the error is spotted and the die is taken out of use there should be a full dies number of any variety to start with. Yet some varieties are very hard to find.

What is your thoughts on this?

lava

I get what you are saying. Survival numbers are just as important as mintage numbers, but what is considered scarce today may be made obsolete by tomorrow's discovery of a hoard under grandma's floorboards.

howards

<< <i>.

do the rarity numbers apply to marriages of estimated minted coins or the ones purported to still have survived?
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Speaking for shield nickels, rarity factors are the estimate of available extant examples, that is, survivors in collectable condition.

Rarity factors of individual die varieties can give one a good estimate for the expected survival rate from any given die. Starting from the mintage to try to estimate this is futile IMO except for moderns.